In a recent clinical examination field, the labor saving of examination work has been achieved by introducing various types of automation apparatuses and examination systems. In addition, in university hospitals and the like, has become widespread examination before medical care by the reduction in an examination reporting time. In an examination before medical care, a process of collecting samples such as blood and urine from a patient and then reporting an examination result is performed within approximately one hour. Regarding the rapidness of examination reporting, preprocessing work such as centrifuging, the unplugging of a blood collection tube, dispensing for subdividing a sample for each necessary examination, and distribution which are preprocessing steps of sample examination accounts for the majority of an examination time, and thus a reduction in time required for the preprocessing work has become a major problem.
Particularly, a centrifuging process for extracting a serum component from blood collected from a patient includes a process of transferring a sample from a conveyance line to a centrifuge device (process 1), a process of performing centrifuging (process 2), and a process of transferring the sample from the centrifuge device to the sample conveyance line (process 3), and it takes five to fifteen minutes for the whole processing. In addition, the sample preprocessing system and the processes 1 and 3 are real-time processes of sequentially processing samples one by one, while the process 2 of the centrifuge device is a batch process of simultaneously processing several tens of samples. For this reason, when the centrifuge device is incorporated into the sample preprocessing system using a general method, an idle time of the sample preprocessing system is caused, and thus it is not possible to efficiently process a sample. For this reason, in many examination rooms, centrifuging is separately performed by a stand-alone type centrifuge device independent of the sample preprocessing system, which results in a state where the sample preprocessing system cannot sufficiently contribute to labor saving and rapidness of examination work.
In view of the above-described problem, PTL 1 discloses a centrifuge device that improves centrifuging efficiency by combining a plurality of centrifuge devices with a conveyance line portion and pipelining process 1/process 3 and process 2.